[Special Feature: Viewing the City from Parks] "Miyashita Park" and "Park-based Community Development": On the Recent "Difficulty of Narrating" Urban Parks

2021/06/07

Recent parks have become sociologically difficult to narrate—in this essay, I would like to consider this issue.

When speaking sociologically about parks, the normative concept of "publicness" is always present. From a sociological perspective, parks are representative urban spaces that embody publicness; conversely, the state of publicness embodied by a park is often used as a yardstick for the publicness of the entire urban space in which it is embedded. In such cases, an image of what an ideal public space should be is first envisioned, and actual parks are then graded and criticized based on their gap from that ideological model.

According to Junichi Saito, there are three meanings of publicness: "official" (related to the state), "common" (related to all people), and "open" (accessible to anyone)*1. Among these, the publicness embodied by a park is the third type, where the primary requirement is that the park be a facility accessible to everyone. Therefore, when a park is criticized from the perspective of normative publicness, it is condemned for "being closed when it should be open." Indeed, Saito also cites parks as an example in this context, stating: "To give one example, a space with water, shade, benches, and public toilets represents what might be called the final safety net for human beings, but it is well known that there are movements to take even that away and turn parks into closed spaces"*2.

The movements surrounding Miyashita Park in Shibuya Ward are likely a typical example of such criticism. "Miyashita Park," which opened in July 2020, is a complex facility integrating a shopping mall, hotel, park, and parking lot, redeveloped by Shibuya Ward in collaboration with a major developer. However, in the process of this redevelopment, the homeless people living in Miyashita Park were excluded. There is a prior history to Shibuya Ward's exclusion of the homeless from Miyashita Park; in 2009, during the "Miyashita Nike Park" project—which involved renovating the park after selling the naming rights to a corporation—homeless tents and other belongings were forcibly removed, leading to litigation over the response*3.

The movement to develop stylish commercial facilities housing cafes and luxury brand tenants while excluding the homeless certainly has a blatant and grotesque side. Under the name of a "park," which is supposed to encompass diverse activities, the creation of a tidy commercial space that grants access only to obedient consumers who have a certain amount of money, wear certain clothes, and follow certain behavioral norms is ironic and deserves criticism when measured against the norm of publicness that is "open" to everyone. Using common sociological concepts, this is "gentrification" that makes urban space upscale and exclusive, "privatization" of public space, and the Shibuya Ward policy driving it could be described as "neoliberal."

However, even if such criticisms are justified and one should continue to protest the injustice of exclusion in practice, these words of criticism currently seem to strangely fail to reach their target, losing their original critical potential. The statement that "recent parks are sociologically difficult to narrate" relates to this "failure to reach" of criticism.

Let's consider the same problem from a different angle. In the past, there was a strong adversarial dichotomy between urban planning and "machizukuri" (community development). On one side were uniform, rigid projects imposed top-down by the administration; on the other side were flexible community development movements launched bottom-up by residents based on diverse local needs. If urban planning is a system for urban environment improvement aimed at hardware-side control (regulation and guidance) by the administration, then machizukuri is an activity for improving the living environment aimed at both hardware and software management by pluralistic actors such as residents and NPOs. Today, however, urban planning and machizukuri are not in opposition; urban planning itself has come to incorporate elements of machizukuri*4.

Urban planning, which aims for control, was a system for managing the expansion of urban space during phases of population growth, economic growth, and urban expansion. However, upon entering a phase of population decline, economic stagnation, and urban shrinkage, urban planning needed to respond to diverse social issues at the local level and incorporated machizukuri, which aims for management, into its own program.

A typical example of the results of this machizukuri is none other than the creation of unique parks for each region. In park planning through machizukuri, workshops involving residents are held many times, and designs are carefully refined. Facilitators with specialized knowledge participate, and games and discussions are repeated. From the overall layout down to individual furniture, unique designs are devised that utilize the history and resources of the land and community, rather than typical uniform designs. Furthermore, in the maintenance and management of the completed parks, rather than leaving it to the administration, local residents set up groups for self-management.

In this way, using park creation as a catalyst, communication among residents is revitalized, and the successful experience of solving local issues themselves leads to collaborative efforts to solve further diverse problems. In other words, through the medium of park creation, the revitalization of machizukuri can be expected. According to Shigeru Sato's definition, "Machizukuri is a series of sustainable activities to gradually improve the immediate living environment, enhance the vitality and charm of the town, and realize 'improvement in the quality of life' through the coordination and cooperation of diverse actors based on the resources existing in the local society"*5. This definition fits "park-based community development" perfectly.

This kind of park-based community development is also difficult to criticize from a sociological perspective based on normative publicness. This is because, at first glance, these are "good things." If one were to dare to criticize them, there would perhaps be only the following three directions. First, pointing out "exclusion from participation," where the residents who actively participate are limited and some people are excluded. Second, pointing out that resident-led design and self-management are a "dumping" of tasks by local governments lacking human and financial resources, representing the "mobilization of volunteerism" (here, one can also point out the resonance between "neoliberalism" and volunteer activities*6). And third, pointing out that while appearing to be machizukuri aimed at management, a "control as management" is secretly at work, where the administration controls the evaluation criteria for design and maintenance. However, all of these, like the sociological criticisms of Miyashita Park mentioned earlier, seem somewhat external and lack the power to strike the center of the target.

Currently, "Miyashita Park-like" things and "park-based community development-like" things are proliferating in urban space, and between the two, the sociological perspective is suspended, losing effective words of criticism. Criticisms of Miyashita Park such as "gentrification," "privatization," and "neoliberalism" miss the mark, and criticisms of park-based community development such as "exclusion from participation," "mobilization of volunteerism," and "control as management" veer away from the center. None of them are wrong, but they do not function as radical critiques; the situation progresses steadily on a layer different from the one where such circuits are established, and urban space is transformed. Sociological language has not caught up with the reality of such proliferating spaces and the state of publicness within them.

If narrating the present state of a park's publicness is a litmus test for narrating the present state of publicness in urban space as a whole, then the effectiveness and potential of the sociological perspective depend on how meaningfully (and critically) one can narrate "Miyashita Park" and "park-based community development." I intend to continue refining my thoughts on the origins of the "difficulty of narrating" the parks (and park-like spaces) proliferating in current urban spaces and how to break through it.